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Wednesday, 30 March 2011

Refinancing Loans

Answer: Obviously, the surgeon is the boy's mother!

Ah, another play-on-words riddle. Shame on me...Here's a riddle for everyone to ponder, what does it mean to "refinance a loan"? What are you actually doing when you're refinancing a loan? Well in its most basic sense, it means to swap out your old loan with a more favorable loan.

Pretend you have a mortgage. So when you refinance the loan, you try to find the best mortgage rate on the market and take out a loan at that [presumably higher] rate. Then the money from this refinanced loan will directly pay off the old loan! It's a beautiful symmetry there, within the process of refinancing.

Now of course, the nitty gritty details. Math and math and lots of math is involved with calculating how best to refinance a loan. You want to look for companies/banks that offer "no closing costs refinance" or "no cost refinance" or "no fee refinance", you get the point. The main reason is because the institution that gave you your old loan will charge hefty fees for paying it off early. So if you really do have a homeowner loan or mortgage loan, especially if you have bad credit, make sure you have a no cost refinance!